New Testament
Lesson
John 12:20-33
20 Now among those
who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks.21 They came to
Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee , and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” 22 Philip went and
told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. 23 Jesus answered
them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. 24 Very truly, I
tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains
just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. 25 Those who love
their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it
for eternal life. 26 Whoever serves
me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever
serves me, the Father will honor.
27 “Now my soul is
troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for
this reason that I have come to this hour. 28 Father, glorify
your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will
glorify it again.” 29 The crowd
standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, “An angel
has spoken to him.” 30 Jesus answered,
“This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. 31 Now is the
judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. 32 And I, when I
am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people[a] to myself.” 33 He said this to
indicate the kind of death he was to die.
Pulpits are
interesting parts of the church architecture.
From time to time I get an
invitation to visit a different church to be their guest preacher. Whenever I preach in a church I haven’t been
to before, I am always anxious to stand behind the pulpit to get a feel for
it. I want to stand there and look out
at the still empty pews and imagine how I will be making eye contact with the
people. I want to hold the pulpit to see
how it feels. Most of all, however, I
want to sneak a peek inside the pulpit – just to see what’s back there.
A lot of you
have never looked behind the pulpit, but there are a couple of shelves in most
pulpits, and you often find unusual sorts of odds and ends back there.
Let me see, I
sometimes have hay fever, so I have a box of Kleenex back here. A couple of hymnbooks. A Bible.
Taped to the side of the pulpit are a couple of extra batteries – that’s
in case my portable microphone runs out of juice in the middle of the
sermon. Well, as pulpits go, this one is
rather tame.
I can remember
preaching in one church and inside the back of the pulpit was a fire
extinguisher. One can only wonder what
kind of fire and brimstone preaching would make it necessary to have a fire
extinguisher behind the pulpit.
I can
remember visiting another church and finding, of all things, a telephone. Throughout the sermon my mind kept wondering,
“What do I do if it rings? Stop
preaching and answer it? Ignore it?”
Behind the
pulpit in the chapel at Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta , GA ,
there is a small sign. It is a brass
plate with an inscription, quoting the New Testament lesson for today.
“Sir, we
would see Jesus.”
Of course,
seminaries have changed a great deal in the past several decades since that
chapel was built, and the last time I was there, someone had scotched taped an
appendix to that quote, so that the sign now read, “Sir, or madam, we would see
Jesus.”
The reason
someone put that sign behind the pulpit in the first place is to encourage the
new preachers being trained at the seminary not to proclaim themselves, but to
proclaim Jesus Christ. Every sermon
ought to enable people to see Jesus more clearly.
As a
minister, I am the first to admit that sometimes I am not able to do this. No minister is able to perfectly proclaim Jesus
ALL of the time. We’re all human. Sometimes the sermons we preach simply seem
to cloud the issue, rather than to clarify Jesus – to obscure rather than to
proclaim Jesus.
I have a
friend who, in her early years of ministry, did volunteer work as a chaplain at
a nursing home. One day she was invited
to conduct a Sunday morning service at the nursing home – an invitation which
she accepted gladly. She threw herself
into the task with all of her energy.
She thought very highly of the people who lived at the nursing home and
she wanted to deliver – not just a sermon – but a great sermon. So she worked and worked on it, filled the
trash can with rejected thoughts, until finally she had IT.
The only
trouble with IT is that it was the kind of sermon that only a recent graduate
of the seminary would understand. It had
lots of references to Greek and Hebrew in which the thighbone of Justification
is connected to the hipbone of ecclesiology.
On the day
when she delivered the sermon, the residents of the nursing home gathered in
the activity room. Some were wheeled
in. Others used walkers. A few had I.V. needles in their arms. Nurses gathered around in the back to attend
the service.
Now, one of
the gifts of old age is that you often take the freedom to say the truth, no
matter what the truth is. My friend was
preaching her sophisticated, theologically artistic sermon, when all of a
sudden one of the elderly residents started wheeling her wheelchair out of the
activity room and headed back to her own room.
With each push of the wheel chair, the lady said very loudly, “Blah,
blah, blah, blah.”
Later on, my
friend was telling me about the experience and admitted to me that while she
had tried to preach the greatest sermon of all time, she had failed to help
them “see Jesus” – so that it had become nothing more than “blah, blah,
blah.” She had tried to preach a
graduate level course in theology, but the people just wanted to see Jesus in a
basic level of truth.
There is
something about the Gospel that is on one hand very complex. Whole libraries of books have been written in
which scholars try to unravel the mysteries of God. You want to get to know Jesus? You want to see Jesus? There is an avalanche of material on the
subject.
Understanding
the Trinity. Understanding the sacrifice
of Christ on the cross. Comprehending
fully the meaning of bread broken at the Table and wine shared in the cup. Our faith is full of complexities. We can’t understand them all.
And we can’t
even begin to, until we first “see Jesus.”
There are
times when we have theological questions that simply cannot be answered – not
completely.
From “how can
Jesus be fully human and fully God” to “why do bad things happen to good
people.”
Those are
difficult theological questions.
And until you
first “see Jesus” any answer you give is simply going to be meaningless, “blah,
blah, blah.”
I did a
funeral a few years ago. Now every
funeral has tragedy about it, but you know what I mean when I say that some are
more tragic than others. When Grandma
dies at age 99, that’s sad, but when a child dies at age 5, the tragedy is
magnified.
In this
particular funeral, a woman had an argument with her boyfriend. He killed her in a fit of rage, and then
committed suicide.
I did the
funeral for the woman, who had very rarely attended church.
After her
funeral, the family was filled with grief.
They tried to
seek comfort in God, but they didn’t know God.
They had all
these strange theological ideas.
They thought
the woman would go to heaven – not because God loved her and had mercy on her,
but because God owed it to her because he’d made mistake and had taken her life
too early.
One of the
family members was pregnant at the time of the funeral and the family thought
this child would be the reincarnation of the dead woman. As one of them put it, when you die, you get
the next available new body.
I guess for
them death was kind of like trading cars.
Another
family member believed that when the woman died she became an angel and walked
the earth watching over people. That
theology about angels doesn’t come from the Bible, but from the old TV series,
“Highway to Heaven.”
At one point,
one of them asked me – and they asked me this because I was the trained and
paid theologian in the group – “Why did God let this happen?”
That is a
good question.
But it is a
difficult question.
And you can’t
begin to understand that issue until you have done a lot of ground work.
These people,
who came to church Christmas and Easter only, had no basic understanding of
God. They were asking a doctoral level
question, but all they had at that point was a preschool level of understanding
God.
You can’t
jump from preschool to doctoral level work just like that!
If you want
to understand calculus, at some point you have to first pass 3rd
grade arithmetic.
I looked at
these people and thought, “These people haven’t seen Jesus yet. And anything I say to them is going to be
nothing but ‘blah, blah, blah.’”
The Christian
faith is like an archeological dig. You
look at the surface and you can learn a lot.
You brush away the dust, and then you can learn even more. You dig deeper, you learn more. You dig deeper and deeper and deeper, and
there is more and more to discover.
But you have
to start at the top. Start with the
basics. You can’t understand God and the
complexities of the faith unless you first start with the most basic.
“Sir, we
would see Jesus,” is a statement that in John’s Gospel means more than simply
catching a glimpse of a celebrity who is performing miracles.
It means that
you really want to get to know and believe in Jesus.
Our New
Testament lesson comes from the Gospel of John.
One of the dynamics of John is that “to see” is more than simply to see
something with your eyes. For John, “to
see” is “to believe.”
We see this
early on in the first chapter of John.
Jesus is gathering his disciples and one of them is Philip – Philip, the
one who shows up in the Gospel lesson for today.
In chapter
one, Jesus calls Philip, and Philip goes to find his friend, Nathanael.
He tells him, "We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law,
and about whom the prophets also wrote-- Jesus of Nazareth, the son of
Joseph."
Nathanael is
not impressed. "Nazareth ! Can anything good come from
there?" Nathanael asked.
Philip doesn’t argue. He simply says "Come and -- see."
Jesus meets a
woman at a well. There is a classic
conversation between the two and the woman and Jesus are on completely
different wavelengths. Jesus talks about
how he is the “living water.” The woman
says, “where’s your bucket? Where you
get this water?”
In the end, she comes to
believe that this is Christ – the Messiah.
And John’s Gospel says (John 4:28-29), “
Then, leaving her water jar,
the woman went back to the town and said to the people, ‘Come, see
a man who told me everything I ever did.’”
In chapter nine there is a
wonderful story about a man born blind.
Jesus heals him. Afterwards there
is a long investigation. Was this man
healed? Was this man really born
blind? The man who was healed finally
gets frustrated with this whole process and says that there is a lot he doesn’t
know – but he knows one thing: “I was blind,
but now I see.” (John 9:25)
Amazing Grace!
And he is not simply talking
about how he can now see people and trees and buildings. He can see truth.
Even the
disciples use this word “seeing” in terms of “believing.”
Toward the end of the Gospel of
John, Thomas is told about the Resurrection.
The other disciples tell him, “We have seen the Lord!”
But Thomas is not
impressed. He said to them that he had
to see the nail marks in his hands in order to believe.
In the Gospel of John, “seeing” means more than simply
looking at something. It is
believing. It’s understanding the faith.
In our New Testament lesson, we
read about how there were some “Greeks among those who went up to worship at
the Feast. They came to Philip, who was
from Bethsaida in Galilee ,
with a request. ‘Sir,’ they said, ‘we would like to see Jesus.’”
They don’t want to learn ABOUT
Jesus.
They want to see him.
They want to believe in him.
They want to know him.
In response, Jesus spoke to
them and said these things…
“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of
wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it
dies, it produces many seeds. The man
who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates his life in this world
will keep it for eternal life. Whoever
serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father
will honor the one who serves me. ‘Now my heart is troubled, and what shall I
say? 'Father, save me from this hour'? No, it was for this very reason I came
to this hour. Father, glorify your
name!’”
It is a rather typical kind of
response that Jesus gives in the Gospel of John. Typical because it is complicated. John loves complicated dialogue. But brush away the dust and look deeper at
this long answer, and Jesus is simply saying, “The hour has come. I’m about to die. But I will be resurrected. Follow me.”
It’s hard to
make sense out of life.
It’s hard to understand God.
Life is full of doctoral level
questions.
And until you see Jesus,
and
believe in him,
accepting
his death and resurrection,
nothing
in life will make sense.
Until you start with that basic
level – believing Jesus, everything else will be nothing more than “blah, blah,
blah.”
Have you seen Jesus?
Have you
really seen, and believed?
Have you accepted him as Lord?
Or is everything in your life
still just blah, blah, blah?
Copyright 2015.
Dr. W. Maynard Pittendreigh
All rights reserved
Ministers may feel free to use some or all of this sermon in
their own ministries as long as they do not publish in print or on the Internet
without ascribing credit to the author.